And so we are back to the “Doomsday Clock,” the famous Cold War creation of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Back in 1949, as the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, the hand of the clock was set at seven minutes before midnight. By 1953, it was moved as close as two minutes before midnight. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it moved all the way back to 17 minutes before midnight. In 2012, it was five minutes till—and it’s hard to believe now that it won’t be moved closer.

Thomas Hobbes was on to something when he argued that leviathan states, emerging in the post-Westphalian era, would effectively monopolize the use of force within their own territories. While violent turmoil within a nation might spike for a while—here in the U.S., anarchist assassinations of a century ago, the student protests of a half-century ago, and, more recently, the terrorism of 9-11 and a few homegrown crazies—such violence will eventually be quelled by Hobbesian internal security forces. In any case, terrorism does not pose a threat to the continued existence of a modern state.

Even the bombings in Boston, horrific as they were, do not change this calculus. The inevitable and necessary response to such explosions will be more watchfulness, but there will indeed be a Boston Marathon running next year.

Yet at the same time, the capacity of other states, mobilizing their own Hobbesian capacities to manufacture their own means of violence—including nuclear violence that can actually destroy a nation—continues to grow.

A recent engagement of a play from 1986, Lee Blessing’s “A Walk in the Woods,” gives the theatergoer a sense of foreboding as well as nostalgia. Nominated for several Broadway awards, the drama takes us back to the era of dire nuclear weapons, as well as efforts aimed at negotiating their reduction. Those arms-control efforts gave rise, in turn, to a seemingly permanent subculture of nuclear negotiators, conversant in their own grim—and at times, grimly funny—vernacular of euphemisms and acronyms.

“A Walk in the Woods” is a fictionalized version of a famous incident in the history of U.S.-Soviet arms-control parleys. In June 1982, the American lead negotiator, Paul Nitze, and his Soviet counterpart, Yuli Kvitsinsky, went for a stroll through the forest of Saint-Cergue, a few miles from Geneva. That walk produced a private agreement between the two men, an agreement to lessen the deployment of new Intermediate Nuclear Forces in Europe. However, their informal understanding was immediately repudiated by their respective national leaders.

Yet that moment of wistful amicability—between two Cold Warriors who wanted to avoid a hot war—captured the imagination of the world. And while “Walk” begins with a familiar trope favored by the left—nuanced and sophisticated Russian, naive and brittle American—it contains enough twists and turns to keep everyone amused; the wily one, for instance, is shown to be merely world-weary, if not psychologically dead. The play ends on an ambiguous note, fully in keeping with the forever-war nature of the Cold War, which John F. Kennedy once declared “a long twilight struggle.”

The Cold War eventually ended, of course, but the play includes foreshadowing of things to come. Describing the need for prudence in the era of The Button, one of the characters says, “It used to be that you had to be rational in English and Russian.” But now, one must be rational in “Hebrew, Chinese, Urdu, and Hindi.” That was a quarter-century ago; since then, the need to be rational, for survival’s sake, has extended to even more tongues.

Thus we come back to North Korea. Who is Kim Jong Un? Yes, he seems like the type who, in a slightly different world, would be a playboy son-of-a-dictator student at UCLA, cruising along Sunset Boulevard in a Maserati trying to pick up girls. Is this punk really in charge of his nation’s fate, or are others, in the shadows, pulling the strings? We might recall that in an earlier era these same sorts of questions were asked about Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev—the whole huge discipline of “Kremlinology” arose to glean whatever we could about Soviet intentions and capabilities.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the obvious inability of the U.S. and its allies to foresee what will happen in North Korea, it’s time for a little introspection on our side. Indeed, we could really use some finger-pointing, to be followed by some constructive lesson-learning. We might consider three opportunities for learning:

First, whose bright idea was it to send Jimmy Carter to North Korea as an American negotiator? The former president has made multiple trips to Pyongyang on behalf of the last three presidents: how’s that working out for us? Most recently, in 2011, he accused the U.S. and South Korea of committing “a human rights violation” by withholding food aid.

In fact, according to a 2012 Congressional Research Service report, between 1995 and 2008 the U.S. gave North Korea $1.3 billion in assistance. Today, we can only wonder if that U.S. aid kept the Pyongyang regime from collapsing a decade ago.

Second, we might ask: who told the U.S. military that its future was to be found in counterinsurgency? COIN for the Muslim world sounds great in theory—just as it sounded great in Vietnam in the ’50s and ’60s—but it never seems to work out so well, does it? Here’s hoping that the Pentagon has figured out by now that teaching its troops a few supposedly friend-making phrases of Pashto or Arabic is less valuable than actually stopping an enemy from blowing us up.

And that brings us to the third question: who has been dithering on missile defense for the last three decades?

On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), holding out the promise of making America—and the world—safe from missile threats. In that speech, Reagan closed with this pledge: “My fellow Americans, tonight we’re launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history.” He added, “There will be risks, and results take time.” Yes, the results took time—but not that much time. Less than eight years later, not only had the Berlin Wall fallen, but the Soviet Union itself had imploded.

As a CIA history, based on internal Soviet documents, explains, SDI shook the Kremlin to the core. The Russians weren’t sure that the Americans could build SDI, but they knew that they themselves couldn’t:

The Soviets treated [SDI] as an extremely serious development for two reasons. First, despite their boasting in the 1970s, Soviet leaders—and perhaps Andropov most of all—had great respect for US technological capabilities. Second, SDI had a profound psychological impact that reinforced the trend already anticipated in the new Soviet assessment of the “correlation of forces.”

The CIA study then quoted Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff, assessing the USSR’s inability to compete with the U.S. in this new arms arena:

We cannot equal the quality of U.S. arms for a generation or two. Modern military power is based on technology, and technology is based on computers. In the US, small children play with computers. … Here, we don’t even have computers in every office of the Defense Ministry. And for reasons you know well, we cannot make computers widely available in our society. We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution.

We might pause on those last points: the USSR would need an “economic revolution” to keep up with the Americans, and that could lead to a “political revolution.” And that was the context in which Mikhail Gorbachev, coming to power two years later, in 1985, launched his fateful reforms.

In other words, Reagan’s SDI was a decisive masterstroke that panicked the Soviets into upending their slow-moving system. In 1992, this author heard Vladimir Lukin, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., tell a DC audience that “Reagan’s SDI accelerated the decline of the Soviet Union by five or ten years.”

By now, perhaps even Secretary of State John Kerry has had a chance to reconsider his many past denunciations SDI. For example, in 1985—the same year that Gorbachev took power with a mandate to overhaul the Soviet system in response to SDI—then-Senator Kerry lambasted “Star Wars,” dismissing Reagan’s idea as “a dream based on illusion.” As Kerry now seeks a solution to the Korea crisis, surely he sees the value of defending Seoul, Tokyo, and the U.S. itself.

To be sure, many in the diplomatic world will instinctively bristle at the supposed “unilateralism” of such an approach. Yet in the Hobbesian struggle between nation-states, alliances have a way of proving less important than each state’s ability to defend itself.

However, there’s still hope for—and, in fact, a need for—multilateralists. If all the nation-states of the world were to think seriously about defending themselves, they would discover the value of a new kind of diplomacy. That is, a diplomacy based on verifiable defense technology, such as missile defense.

Bush could go further, beyond alleged unilateralism, beyond reported bilateralism, all the way to enunciated multilateralism. The most obvious and also most lustrous multilateral precedent, in which America sought to create a new peacekeeping structure around the world, is the Truman Administration. In the wake of World War II, Truman put forth the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the Point Four Program to distribute foreign aid to the Third World, the Mutual Security Administration to send out military aid, and, of course, the capstone of post-war peacekeeping, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

In other words, WARNO would be a perfectly valid new form of multilateral diplomacy, aimed at solving an urgent new problem that needs to be solved.

A half-century later, the Cold War is over, but new forms of missile war—and maybe attack by weapons of mass destruction—loom on the horizon. So perhaps the time has come for Bush to propose some equally ambitious security structure, such as, say, a World Anti-Rogue Nations Organization.

As far as the Bush 43 administration is concerned, we’ll never know the answer to those questions, because George W. Bush put his priorities elsewhere. Yet even now, a dozen years later, President Obama has a chance to build a peaceful, peace-keeping structure of mutual security.

The people of America—and all the peoples of the civilized world, who want the skylines of their big cities to remain intact—must mobilize to defend themselves fully. Before it’s too late.

James P. Pinkerton is a contributor to the Fox News Channel and a TAC contributing editor. Follow him on Twitter.

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19 Responses to ‘Star Wars’ Is the Way to Deal With North Korea

James Pinkerton’s recounting of the history of SDI and its impact on Soviet thinking was very interesting, but it begs the question why the Soviets would have found it to be such a threat or something they would feel compelled to match. SDI, even in the form the greatest optimists hoped to achieve, was never going to accomplish more than remove the threat of a missile released by rogue forces or set off accidentally, or perhaps a concerted attack by a minor nuclear power, such as North Korea aspires to be. The Soviets were already equipped to launch hundreds of missiles no conceivable anti-missile system the U.S. might build would be capable of totally deflecting or destroying. The deterrent quality of the Soviet nuclear arsenal against the United States would not be seriously diminished. If the Soviets felt they had to “keep up”, it would appear they fell prey to the same thinking that caused the U.S. to continue to build nuclear missiles far in excess of that needed to destroy our enemies just so there would be no “imbalance” between our respective arsenals.

As for bringing down the North Korean regime (a feat which, although laudable. may prove, like Syria, to be one where the cure may be more hazardous than the disease) I would think the most destabilizing measure the U.S. could take would be to remove all our forces for the Korean peninsula. The raison d’etre of the North Korean state, throughout its history, the reason it has been able to keep its population in abject poverty for decades, has been its unceasing propaganda convincing its subjects that they must constantly fear another U.S. invasion. It has been as successful in molding public opinion in the northern half of the Korean peninsula as has the campaign to make believe Islamic terrorism is a threat to the national security of the United States has been here. Take away that threat in a manner so open and complete that it could not help but capture the attention of the people of North Korea and that regime’s days will be numbered indeed. How to handle the consequence of that collapse, however, is a monumental task for which great preparations must be made to avoid calamity.

I will be called an appeaser, but has anyone ever asked the question why America is targeted by North Korea ? It has everything to do with US troops stationed right next to North Korea. By removing not only will it remove the threats of war from North Korea, it will also mean that finding a foreign bogeyman for the North Korean propaganda machine will be much harder and could lead to real reforms.

I mentioned this in an earlier post. Kim Jong Un is a front for a gigantic North Korean Nomenklatura that is anything but suicidal. The generals and top level bureaucrats are embedded into the normative model of an autocratic, kleptocratic State. I.e., they live large on the backs of the populace. Their interest is self-interest, not the maintenance of Kim at the helm at any price.

Kim cannot launch nuclear missiles on his own. It would require compliance by the entire chain of command. The idea that they would all buy into an assured annihilation response by the United States is nuts.

South Korea is twice as populated, many times richer and has far superior, modern weapons systems. They don’t need an American missile shield or even an American presence. Because the North Koreans may feign crazy, but they ain’t stupid.

“First, whose bright idea was it to send Jimmy Carter to North Korea as an American negotiator? The former president has made multiple trips to Pyongyang on behalf of the last three presidents: how’s that working out for us?”

Hmmm . . . I am not sure who is best to have a sit down with N. Norea. But I have no doubts that talk is better than not and we have noting to lose by doing so. How it is working out is dependent on what the goals of such conversations are. Merely suggesting an interrogative as though there is a definitive negative is inacurate, maybe incomplete is a better word. What the goal of the communication is the key to answering interrogative. And I am unclear about what those goals are and I am not sure even the admin knows, though they should.
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“SDI, even in the form the greatest optimists hoped to achieve, was never going to accomplish more than remove the threat of a missile released by rogue forces or set off accidentally, or perhaps a concerted attack by a minor nuclear power, such as North Korea aspires to be.”

Even today the current SDI program is a bust. The tests are so staged at every level for success that it seems rather unlikely that a random or deliberate missle could be targeted and effectively removed from its trajectory. Unless we invest in laser technology — our current SDI is largely and experiment in futility. Though I understand the strategic influence is touting it as effective. The first Gulf war demonstrated just how ineffective missile to missile intervention are.
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“Truman Administration. In the wake of World War II, Truman put forth the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the Point Four Program to distribute foreign aid to the Third World, the Mutual Security Administration to send out military aid, and, of course, the capstone of post-war peacekeeping, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”

I doubt the Marshall Plan is applicable in this instance. We are not responding to a post WWII scenario. While aid to N. Korrea will be part of any package — it seems an inadequate example.

I think honest, forthright and sincere dialogue with no illusions about appeasing anyone are quite the first order of business.

Multilateralism isn’t going to be a genuine option, because our country’s elites want complete operational, essentially unilateral, control. Moreover, who is a “rogue nation” is largely determined by parochial elite national interests.

As long as our leaders are determined to confront China, North Korea serves a useful countervailing purpose for China. Were that to change, North Korea’s intractability and dangerous posturing would be seen as an untenable threat to China’s economic stability without strategic benefit and China would likely solve the North Korean problem in a heartbeat.

Certainly, the answer can’t be even more trillions pumped into the industrial-military complex and ever more escalated Mutually Assured Destruction, this time, multilateral rather than bipolar.

“Kim cannot launch nuclear missiles on his own. It would require compliance by the entire chain of command. The idea that they would all buy into an assured annihilation response by the United States is nuts.”

How do you know this? In all other nuclear countries, it probably requires “compliance by the entire chain of command.” In North Korea, it might be: Kim -> Head of Armed Forces -> On-site launch commander. Could be just 3 men total.

Ronald Reagan sure looks good on this in retrospect. Nobody serious every thought the Star Wars had any chance of stopping a full blown all-in Soviet nuclear launch. Star Wars (as technology developed) could have a 50%+ chance of stopping a rouge missile launch by an on-site Russian commander or the two dozen or so Red Chinese ICBM’s of the time. Remember that Reagan offered the technology to the Soviets. (They are responsible for their own paranoia on this issue.)

If nothing else, this tack will be good for the MIC. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but it is important to keep track of where the money is going so we can know what is actually going on vs. what appears to be going on.

Interestingly, the FX series The Americans about KGB agents living in the US in the 80s, relies heavily on the folklore that the Soviets greatly feared SDI. I know “everyone knows” this to be true, but I’m not sure I buy it. It’s all seems a little too convenient to me. The Government that spent a lot of money on something that never came to fruition assures us it really was worth all that money in the end even though no product was ever actually produced.

William Dalton is right. Just withdraw our troops and eliminate the threat of invasion; leave South Korea to provide for its own defense. They can certainly afford it these days, particularly up against a nation so impoverished it can’t even feed its own people.

All we need is to keep a couple or three carriers in the west Pacific, and maybe a couple of military bases in the southernmost parts of the Korean peninsula for rapid deployment into the theater. If North Korea attacks South Korea, we’ll be able to put carriers into the area immediately, and start pouring in ground troops pretty quickly thereafter. North Korea knows we can do this; they won’t risk an invasion. In addition, they need China, and I can see China abandoning them pretty quickly if they create that kind of instability in China’s back yard. Besides, we’ve mined the hell out of the DMZ; it’s not like they’d be able to just roll across the border. They’ve got a long list of good reasons not to start anything, all of which add up to “survival.”

As for SDI, let it go. We don’t need to pour additional billions into missile defense that may or may not work; there is no way the regime is suicidal enough to attack a nation with over 2,000 nuclear weapons and ICBMs to deliver them. And no, I don’t believe for a second that Kim Jong Un is much beyond a figurehead — maybe one with a long leash and a lot of ability to make many of his own calls as long as it perpetuates the wealth, power and privilege of whatever inner circle is really in charge, but still a figurehead serving at the pleasure of those around him. He isn’t some tyrant like Hitler or Saddam Hussein who built his own dictatorship through cunning and brutality and a core of loyal supporters; he inherited his position in a system already in place for decades. If he puts the nation in too much danger, he’ll no doubt “step down” — or maybe die at the hands of “American agents” — and be replaced by someone more reliable.

Re: Richard Parker (again) “How many men had to be lunatics to blunder into WW I?”

Those European Power Elite Nitwits actually thought that they could win. The North Korean Nitwits are under no such illusion…

P.S. Note the historic arrogant idiocy of American Power Elite Nitwits and then ask yourself if it actually makes sense to cede war-making power to those hubris and conceit infected Clowns in any context.

In the late 50s I visited Washington with another family, and their son and I went to the USSR embassy and asked if they had any free brochures or information that we could have. This confirmed my suspicion, in spades, that the whole cold war was a farce to keep the companies making airplanes, nuclear bombs, and oil drilling equipment in contracts. The colours and the printing, the layout and the buildings were all so badly done that it was obvious to me at age fourteen that the Soviets were not a serious contender, only a prop, an enemy of convenience. After all they had been our ally little more than a decade before.

In my early twenties my brother and I hitchhiked by accident onto a Russian Army base in Czechoslovakia, and I got the same impression. Flying Aeroflot a few times and sailing on the Alexander Pushkin confirmed my first views on the Soviet Threat a few years later. The whole cold war hysteria and this new one were scams obvious to smart children, but making them a bit obvious is part of the production. It is so obvious that it is obvious to smart people that it is all one big game, so they better play along.

This, like watching steel buildings do free-fall after being doused with kerosene, is a farce, a fraud like the Maine, like burning the Reichstag. What possible business is of the British and the Americans what they do in little, backward North Korea or Afghanistan? Are the North Koreans playing The Mouse That Roared again? The crazier they are the more they need to be left alone. Wanting to spend billions on paper tigers is Conservatism?

Like Gaddafi and the Taliban, their only real threat is that their open, taunting disregard for American power makes the Yankees look silly. Big money drives the military/industrial/media/university complex, and the realities of Vietnam and Afghanistan, Iran and Korea are always far far removed from any threat to America or Europe. I knew what was going on quite clearly in the second grade when our mothers would pick us up at school and drive car loads of children twenty miles out of town on drills to practice for a nuclear attack. We knew that the target was the oil depot near the airport and convergence of two major highways, with a Westinghouse plant nearby, and my geeky friend already knew the blast radius of various atomic weapons. We knew this whole exercise was silly and counter productive and said so; we were told not to talk again until we got home.

While he at once underestimates the ease with which high tech countermeasures can defeat strategic missile defenses, and overstates the role of the original SDI in precipitating the Soviet Union’s collapse from within, the current North Korean ICBM threat is neither sophisticated or strategic , and like the ill-guided and undecoyed missiles Hamas hurls in Isreaels general direction, can be dealt with by what are basically upgraded anti-aircraft missile systems like Patriot and Iron Dome

Before swallowing the contractors rehashed PR handouts from the 80’s , pundits should recall how much SDI technology promised for delivery in the late 90’s has yet to materialize- using bullets to hit bullets that shoot back is very hard work.

Let’s pause for a moment and recall that SDI never existed; it was billions of dollars spent on pure laser / x-ray / directed energy science fiction, i.e. you can’t fool someone twice with the same lie.

Also I would like to understand how advocating massive amounts of spending falls into this notion of conservatism? Whether we’re spending to keep half the nation on welfare or spending to create fantasy x-ray lasers to stop the chubby bad guys half a world away, it’s still spending. That isn’t conservatism.

Is the American Conservative just another neocon platform for the defense contractor warlords?

“Ha, Ha, stoopid Americans. They not know it easy make more cheap bullets and cost so much make bullet to hit bullet. Americans so funny, where they spend their money.” Lee Kim Miedong.
I still can’t help but think that the crisis’ w/nkorea are manufactured war gaming exercises by the chinese who simply want to monitor our strategic and tactical responses. Deploying missile anti missile tech would just be informational in their gaming. American projection of power strategy simply provides very expensive target rich environments for very cheaply mass produced anti-ship missiles. But maybe everybody has already figured out that is what the anti-missile tech development is all about. That is, how to protect trillion dollar flotillas of aircraft carriers projecting US power in securing energy supply rather than spending a fraction of that on alternative green energy. Or is it those pesky evangelicals dragging us off to protect the holy lands for the second coming, god willing? Either way, it must be great entertainment for the oriental mind.